Edward Vincent

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a survivor’s tale about a polish Jew who lived during the Holocaust. It is also a comic book. Comic books are generally believed to either be humorous, low-brow sketch books made for children or valueless super-hero science fiction. For many people, including Vladek Spiegelman (the main character of Maus), the comic book format is something to be dismissed right away. To them, the comic book holds no value and is mindless entertainment. They are wrong. The comic book is just another medium to transmit a message, and a particularly good one at that. There is not a more perfect medium to tell the story of Vladek Spiegelman than the comic book format.

The devaluation of the comic book is looked down upon in western culture only, where the typical fans of comics are young children and the archetypal comic book nerd, while other parts of the world see comics differently. Outside of western society, people of all ages will read comic books of all genres. One particular example is Japan and its manga (comic book) industry. The roughly $5,000,000,000[1] annual sales produced by the manga industry is unfathomable to the average American. The manga come in all shapes and sizes, with all different kinds of content and subject matter. They range from being silly to serious, fiction and non-fiction, gritty and realistic or cartoony and colorful. A Japanese person would not find anything wrong with telling a serious World War II story such as Maus in the format of text bubbles and anthropomorphism.

Speaking of anthropomorphism, Maus, by characterizing different ethnicities as different species of animals, can simplify a complex idea to its audience better than words ever could. The issue of ‘race’ was very important to the events during World War II while all sides, Axis and Allied, played the race card in one way or another. The only reason Vladek, his friends and family were captured and put through this horrific tragedy is because of their ethnicity. Also, by characterizing the Jews as mice and the Polish as pigs, Art Spiegelman is making a comment on the Nazi propaganda from the period which portrayed Poles as pigs and Jews specifically as rats. At the same time, making the characters non-human allows for a separation from the hardships they’re going through, allowing the reader to get the entire message without being scared of it. And finally, the symbolism of Jews as mice and Nazis as vicious cats makes it very clear to anyone who doesn’t know already who the victims are.

It might be said by certain detractors that the comic book format has no value, that it is all mindless entertainment that corrupts the mind. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even mainstream American comic book publishers place strong social messages in their collected works. From Spider-Man to the Green Lantern, Marvel entertainment has done a good job bringing the issues of society to the masses.[2] Maus’ message is mostly the documentation of one man, but the novel serves as an important historical preservation. For example on page 56 of Maus’ second volume, Vladek is pleading with his wife, Anja, to care for herself and worry less about her fellow Birkenau prisoners but she continues to help them. A detractor would have a very hard time saying that this tiny, frail woman sharing what little food she had with her friends is mindless and without value.

There are not many other mediums which could even attempt to tell this story as well as the comic book form. For example, the style used for the first visual confirmation of anti-Semitism seen by Vladek and his companions on page 33 of volume 1 on the way to see Anja in the sanitarium could not be done any other way. The visual of the swastika behind each act of violence is so striking; how could this be done in any other medium? Novelized, this story might be more detailed, yet less disturbing and it would be hard to emotionally attach yourself to what is being explained. If this were done on film, the constant of the swastika behind the action would look experimental and over-stylized (not to mention violent), further detaching the viewer from the message. Performed on stage, the scene would be too elaborate and technical to be taken as literally and meaningfully as portrayed in the comic. The comic book format allows the imagery to be expressed without taking the reader away from the story.

The comic book format also permits visuals that would be impossible to demonstrate in the real world. Some visuals would be possible in film, but would be extremely expensive to stage practically, and even more expensive to achieve through visual effects. Also, faking the visuals through visual effects would detract from the realism film-goers expect. There is a cut-away view on page 86 in volume 1 that shows how Vladek’s family hid the oldest members from the Jewish police. On the next page, Vladek tells Art about the Jewish police and is shown in silhouette; however their eyes and glasses remain visible. This is a slow build up to the bottom of page 87 where they have to give up their grandparents to the gas chambers. This is a visual style that has only been shown on film in Sin City, which is ironically a comic-book translation.

The comic book format allows for effects that can’t even be described. We see a very personal view of Vladek as he is looking at his photographs on page 116 in volume 2. It is one drawing of Vladek divided into comic panels to frame different parts of his pictorial epitaph. What does that even mean? It has such a profound effect that can not be defined. It is story telling at its best; creating emotions in you that you can not describe in words.

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